SOLVED: hpacucli Error: No controllers detected.

It would seem that HP doesn't care to acknowledge the existence of 3.0 or newer kernels with their array configuration tool hpacucli. The solution is to lie to the tool with a custom uname wrapper that can be found here: http://mirror.anl.gov/pub/linux/kernel/people/ak/uname26/

Failing install with kvm, need to jump to annother virtual console?

When installing under KVM it is sometimes useful to switch to another virtual console to trouble shoot. The problem is it is not obvious how to do this when using JollysFastVNC on a mac. The trick is to disconnect and adjust the "Keyboard Input" under the connection settings to "Immersive", this will make the function keys work as they would if you had a real console. You do not need to use the "fn" key as you would normally do in osx. Once this change is made and you have reconnected switching the virtual console is just a alt-fn key.

Jumbo Frames and Xen don't mix well

It seems that while the pethN and ethN in a dom0 can be set to support jumbo frames the bridge that connects them cannot. Some symptoms are ssh works but scp does not, pings the size flag set to overflow the standard 1500 mtu fail, ifconfig xenbr0 mtu 9000 fails. This was tested with xen 3.1 and rhel5.

Copying dumps from Postgres to MonetDB

When moving bulk data from postgres to monetdb you can use the psql \copy directive and the mclient copy like so:

psql:
\copy gftp_packets to 'my dump file' with csv
mclient:
copy into gram_packets from 'my dump file' delimiters ',','\n' ;

Booleans don't work, but a little python will fix it up:

fin = open('my dump file', 'r')
fout = open('my new dump file', 'w')
falserep = (x.replace(',f,',',0,') for x in fin)
truerep = (x.replace(',t,',',1,') for x in falserep)
for line in truerep: fout.write(line)

I was too lazy to fix the problem with successive booleans, so I just rinsed and repeated until all the t's and f's were 0's and 1's.

Google Fiber for Communities

If you are a Bloomington area person please let me know. I am trying to organize a bid for the Google Fiber for Communities experiment. http://www.google.com/appserve/fiberrfi/

Bonnie++ and Xen

I ran some filesystem tests with bonnie++ on a DomN, Dom0, and the machine that is exporting the lun over iscsi. The results can be found here. Looks like there is some significant impact from using Xen on older cpu's without the extra virtualization goodies. I suspected this would be the case but now I have some hard numbers.

14:59 Remaining

Somebody noticed a comment I made and turned it into a whole blog entry. Looks like I've got 14:59 remaining.